Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering announced the Open-Call-CNIE Inspiration-Grants 2016-2018following the success of the first and second round of CNIE Call for “Inspiration” Grants launched in 2015 and continued in 2016 as a result of the workshop organised by the EPSRC "Frontier Engineering" Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering (CNIE) on 28 July 2015, to stimulate discussions between researchers of other Centres from across the UK, industrial partners, and CNIE researchers.

The Open CNIE Call for "Inspiration" Grants is open to all academic researchers in the UK. The aim of these short postdoctoral projects is to explore opportunities, in collaboration with CNIE researchers at UCL, to apply nature-inspired engineering within other projects and/or to obtain preliminary results prior to applying for a longer-term grant.

Projects should fully align to the vision of the Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering, as well as to one or more of four research areas, which were identified during CNIE workshop:

Extraction/collection: examples include diesel particulate removal, CO2 capture, water purification, removing/transforming highly diluted substances from water or air, membrane encapsulation, where lessons could be drawn from the workings of fish gills (oxygen), salps (as filters; self-organising), hyacinths and mangrove trees (adapted for salt water), leaves (photocatalysis and CO2 sequestration), etc.; this could be, but does not have to use techniques from synthetic biology or advanced materials

Communication across scales: examples include control of materials assembly processes, multi-scale models of communication in biological systems, linguistic strategies for self-organisation, where lessons could be drawn from protein assemblies, biofilms, crystal growth, bacterial communities, etc.

Catalysis: examples include fuel cell and photo-catalysis, how catalytic processes in nature can be accelerated for industrial applications, passive clean-up applications where time does not matter for practical applications, etc.

Self-healing materials: examples include self-healing concrete and the exploration of other materials systems, the use of synthetic bacteria, delivery systems within materials to supply nutrients, energy, and carry away waste, implants with symbiosis with the body’s own healing systems, self-healing electronics, etc.